Plan sites
The first step in planning a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment is to identify the set of sites and their hierarchy necessary to achieve your goals. You should set specific objectives for each portal, internet, team, and specialized site. A good SharePoint site provisioning plan clearly lays out the growth strategy so that site sprawl is prevented and an easy to navigate topology is strictly enforced.
Plan portal sites
Portal sites are the core of most MOSS implementations. The structure of portal sites usually mirrors the hierarchy of an organization. Portal sites should aggregate information such that information relevance and site navigation provides the most productive experience possible.
Planning portal sites by organizational hierarchy
Plan your portal sites based on divisions, departments, regions, and cross-organization functions. While planning your site topology the most important factor is the size of your organization.
A small organization may have only one portal site (roll-up) with department sites contained. A medium sized organization may have a site for every division or project of 50-100 people. Larger organizations will have several levels of portal sites, the key being that relevant content is created and consumed at the relevant level in the organizations hierarchy.
For each aggregate site or Shared Services Provider (SSP) level, plan to create a rollup portal site with an aggregated view of all related portal sites. This is also the level for search aggregation.
Planning application portal sites
An application portal enables business processes, this may include data storage and manipulation, dashboards, and workflow processes. Again, the key is planning ahead. Identifying the naming conventions, navigational hierarchy, and objectives of each portal application site is the key to success.
Plan Internet presence sites
Public-facing SharePoint sites usually require more fore thought in the branding and navigational elements. Often organization choose to use a staging site to test new content/functionality prior to publishing on an externally-facing portal. Content deployment features are built-in, making content staging and production deployment easy.
Other sites
Other sites include: My Sites, Document Workspaces, Team Sites, Meeting Workspaces, Document Centers, Record Management, and many other site types. The key to managing site sprawl is deciding who can create new sites, where new sites will be created, and what content types are expected. The "who" should match the level in the in the site hierarchy, for example the HR content owner can make decisions about adding a Document Workspace to create a new employee handbook. The "where" should be evident in most cases, however, some initiatives will span several division, departments, or regions in your organization. The "what" should be know by the person requesting the new site. Make sure that the type of site created matches the content type to be housed there (i.e. document workspaces house documents).
Plan customizations
There are several things to keep in mind when planning customizations. First, plan your source control and backup/recovery strategy so that your customizations are easy recovered when needed. Second identify early on which customizations are common across multiple sites, this will lead to easier maintenance and deployment strategies.
Plan personalization sites
Personalization sites offer targeted (filtered) content based on user roles or preferences. Users of a personalization sites have the option to view their personal view or the general content.
Plan site collections
A site collection is a group of sites that you can manage together. Site collections can share permissions template galleries, content types, and web parts. Usually site collections also share common navigation elements. Your portal site will typically be implemented as a site collection with a top-level site as the home page for other sites in the collection.
When planning a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, put each of the following types of sites in separate site collections:
- Portal sites
- Internet sites-staging
- Internet sites-production
- All team sites related to a portal site or Internet site
- Document Center sites
- Records Center sites
Plan security
Security planning is one of the most important tasks in your MOSS implementation plan. Your plan should address both authentication and authorization.
Authentication planning revolves around the selection authentication method(s). The main options are Windows integrated and forms-based authentication. Typically Windows authentication is used for internal users and forms-based authentication is used for external users.
Authorization planning should include categorizing users, determining permission levels. Once you have determined your groups and permissions you will assign users to groups and assign permissions to those groups. These permissions will then be applied to various types of content and SharePoint objects (i.e. lists, libraries, sites, etc.).
Plan search needs
Each site will require planning of the search scope for that sites content. Once you have determined your site search scopes, you will configure the farm's index service to index the content efficiently. The key is to determine the information needed by the users of each site and how to aggregate results at the site collection and in some cases across site collections. Always limiting content to the most appropriate levels. The indexing schedule can be determined by the amount of "data churn" and the timeliness of the content. If the content is expected to be created or changed frequently or if the data is time sensitive then your indexing should be more frequent.
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